When it comes to marketing your products, it is very hard to identify the best approach right away. It takes trial and error to optimize your marketing strategy. They say time is money, so it’s beneficial for site owners to identify their optimal marketing strategy as quickly as possible.

We’ve noticed that popovers amplify user behavior for better or worse. To put it bluntly, if your value proposition sucks, visitors will ignore your popover. In startup parlance, this helps you “fail faster.” On the other hand, a popover that resonates with visitors and attracts people to opt-in reveals a good strategy, one that is likely to accelerate sales.

Some would argue that if the site owner does not yet have a repeatable sales process they should not add a popover to their site. They may have a point: a bad popover yields bad results, so why bother? The rationale is that if you don’t understand the needs of your visitors, your pleas will fall on deaf ears and no one will opt-in.

But for site owners who are just starting out and don’t yet understand their users very well, the popover message can be framed in a way that helps the site owner learn about the challenges faced by their visitors. Later, when the sales process is better understood, the popover can morph into a more direct call-to-action. At this point, users should feel like the popover read their minds. Over time we can expect continued optimization as the site owner responds to new information from visitors and changes in the market.